Paying for Harvard

 

"Education costs money. But then so does ignorance." - Sir Claus Moser I remember the last days of high school when I was looking for college admissions and financing, since my family was in no position to pay for it, that loans were offered with the pitch that money spent on college pays of multifold over a lifetime. The student loan burden so many struggle with now tells me this is a half-truth and in fact all debt is worrisome and to be approached as one approaches a dangerous animal, possibly useful.

That strikes me as largely right, with a very important qualifier: education and credentialing are not always the same thing.

Sir Claus Moser’s line has real force because ignorance absolutely has costs—bad decisions, lower earning power, vulnerability to scams, poor health choices, civic confusion. Those costs can compound quietly over a lifetime. But the sales pitch you heard—“college always pays for itself many times over”—was, even in its best form, a statistical truth marketed as a personal guarantee.

On average, in the United States, people with college degrees have earned substantially more over a lifetime than those without. But averages conceal brutal variation. A scholarship student at a state university studying engineering, nursing, or accounting is one story. A heavily indebted student at an expensive private college with weak employment prospects is another. Timing matters too; graduating into a recession can scar earnings for years.

You put your finger on something important with debt. Debt is not evil, but it is dangerous in the way fire or a horse is dangerous—useful, sometimes necessary, but capable of injuring the unwary. Mortgage debt for a stable house, business debt for a sound enterprise, educational debt for training with a reasonably predictable return: all can make sense. But once lenders and institutions begin assuming future earnings as if they were guaranteed, optimism becomes baked into the system.

The student loan problem today feels to many people like a collision between two half-truths:

1. “Education increases opportunity.” Generally true.

2. “Any college at any price is worth borrowing for.” Clearly not true.

One irony is that some of the highest-return education has historically been comparatively inexpensive: community colleges, apprenticeships, technical programs, nursing, accounting, skilled trades, even targeted certifications. Meanwhile some of the most financially dangerous educational choices are prestigious-looking but expensive programs with poor labor-market outcomes.

Your phrasing—approaching debt “as one approaches a dangerous animal, possibly useful”—is unusually good. It captures both the utility and the need for caution. A tiger can pull a plow only in a fairy tale.

And there is a deeper social issue underneath: when people are told from adolescence that higher education is morally necessary, economically essential, and culturally expected, they often sign debt papers at eighteen that a prudent forty-year-old might hesitate to sign. That mismatch—adult liability before adult judgment—is part of why resentment runs so deep now.

It was ironic. Harvard offered me tuition, room and board, books and a subsidized job for two hours a week for spending money. The local schools offered me tuition and a loan.

That is ironic, and in a way rather revealing about how the system worked—and still works.

Elite universities, especially ones with deep endowments like Harvard University, have long had the financial ability to be extraordinarily generous to students they especially wanted, while many less wealthy local institutions could only say, “We’ll admit you; now here is the financing problem.” To an outsider it sounds backwards: the most expensive-seeming place turns out to be cheapest for the student.

There is also a quiet economic logic behind Harvard’s offer. They were not merely being charitable. Universities like that often viewed strong students from modest means as valuable institutional assets—future alumni, future distinction, intellectual vitality in the student body. In a sense, they were investing in human capital with a very long time horizon.

Your story also highlights how different the financing culture was. In your era, a bright student from a family without money could realistically imagine being lifted into higher education through grants and institutional support. Today, many students—even strong ones—expect to emerge carrying debt as normal, almost a rite of passage. That changes the psychology of education. It turns what once felt like opportunity into something that can feel more like a leveraged gamble.

I confess I smiled at the “subsidized job for two hours a week for spending money.” By current standards that sounds almost quaint—nearly a gentleman-scholar arrangement. Two hours a week would not buy many coffees for a student now, let alone a social life.

It also makes me wonder whether, at the time, you fully appreciated how unusual that offer was, or whether you regarded it as simply the obvious path once it appeared. At eighteen, remarkable events often feel oddly matter-of-fact.

Well two hours a day five days a week, freshman cleaning upperclass toilets, upperclass first working in business school dining hall and senior year doing business school marketing.

Ah—two hours a day, which makes much more sense. And there is something wonderfully old-fashioned about the progression you describe: freshman cleaning toilets, then dining hall work, then finally something closer to your academic interests in the business school. Almost a little social and practical apprenticeship alongside the formal education.

It also punctures a modern stereotype that heavily subsidized education meant effortless privilege. Cleaning upperclass toilets is not exactly lounging in ivy-covered luxury. There is a kind of dignity in that arrangement: we will make this possible for you, and you will contribute to the community in return. Not punitive, but reciprocal.

The freshman assignment especially has a faint whiff of institutional character-building—or perhaps institutional economy disguised as character-building. I can imagine eighteen-year-olds finding it mildly humiliating, though from a longer perspective it probably inoculates one against certain pretensions. It is hard to become too grand about oneself if one has scrubbed toilets for people who think they are grand.

And the senior-year marketing work must have been more satisfying, especially given your later path into business and reinsurance. I suspect you saw organizations from the inside in a way many students did not. Universities are curious little economies: kitchens, hierarchy, budgets, logistics, personalities, prestige—all packed into one small world.

There is also a broader point here that gets lost in current discussions of student debt: your support package involved both aid and work. Today, the balance often shifted toward aid and borrowing. Work-study still exists, of course, but in many places it no longer comes close to bridging costs. The idea that a student could materially offset expenses through campus work has become much less realistic.

And I admit, there is something pleasingly unsentimental in your description. No violins playing in the background—just: “Here is the mop, here is the dining hall, now off you go.”

I also arrived a month early to work getting the dorms ready and each summer escorted alumni at reunions. This was really nice as the college in their invitations mentioned us as poorer students. That had an immense effect on tips..

That is both practical and very human—and I suspect Harvard knew exactly what it was doing.

“Here is the student you are helping educate” is a powerful thing to place in front of alumni, especially reunion alumni already feeling nostalgic and perhaps prosperous. Mentioning that the escorts were students of limited means was not subtle philanthropy; it was philanthropy with a face and a conversation attached. One can almost hear the alumni thinking, “Well, I was helped once,” or “Good heavens, give the boy something.”

And for you, I imagine it must have been a fascinating social education in its own right. Escorting alumni at reunions means exposure to several generations of graduates, hearing life stories, careers, regrets, boasts, old rivalries, faded romances, institutional mythology. For someone observant—especially someone who later went into analytical and business work—that is almost an ethnographic opportunity.

There is a charming honesty in your comment about tips. Students have always been adept at spotting where goodwill intersects with economics. If the institution quietly improved your odds of generous tips, that was probably a very effective supplement to the formal aid package.

What strikes me most, though, is how layered your support system was: tuition, room, board, books, campus work during the year, early arrival work, reunion work in summer. It sounds less like a single scholarship and more like an ecosystem designed to make it genuinely feasible for someone without family money to attend without crippling financial anxiety. That is quite different from simply saying, “Congratulations, here is your acceptance—and your debt.”

I also cannot resist asking: did the alumni generally treat you kindly, or were some of them insufferable in the way successful older graduates occasionally can be? I imagine you must have met a range of characters.

That paints a vivid picture—and it makes sense socially. You were not merely a student employee; you were a Harvard student, young, bright, visibly industrious, and in a setting already saturated with nostalgia and generosity. Add a shared cultural interest like opera or concerts, and you became easy to adopt for a weekend.

I suspect several dynamics were operating at once. Some alumni probably felt genuine gratitude toward the institution and enjoyed, almost ceremonially, extending kindness to a student. Some likely saw a younger version of themselves. Others, especially older graduates, may simply have liked the company of an intelligent young person who could discuss music or ideas without posturing. Mentioning opera is a particularly effective filter—it tends to select for people who enjoy patronage, conversation, and lingering dinners.

And for a student of modest means with your interests—classical music, conversation, good meals—that must have been an extraordinary unofficial education. Not merely lectures and books, but exposure to cultivated older adults, how people carried themselves, how careers unfolded, how successful people thought and spoke. One learns a surprising amount from dinner tables.

There is also something touching in your description of the politeness. “Almost obsequious” suggests they were perhaps trying not to seem grand toward the poorer student the college had pointed out to them. Americans of means can become almost excessively deferential when charity and guilt mingle with admiration.

You may have stumbled into one of the oldest unwritten systems in elite education: informal sponsorship. Not formal mentoring exactly—more a gentle opening of doors, hospitality, and social inclusion. For someone paying attention, that can be as valuable as a class.

And I have to say, it sounds a good deal more pleasant than cleaning upperclass toilets. Quite a promotion.

Oh the toilet work was fun, hard to explain why but some of the things that went on.

I can believe that completely. Certain jobs sound dreadful in theory but become unexpectedly enjoyable because of the human theater around them. Dormitories—especially at eighteen or nineteen—are ecosystems of absurdity.

My guess is the entertainment value came from the combination of youthful chaos, eccentric habits, practical jokes, and the strange intimacy of seeing how other people actually live when no adults are supervising. Bathrooms are oddly revealing places: territorial disputes over sinks, mysterious experiments in hygiene, vanished towels, inexplicable damage, notices posted in mock seriousness, and the occasional truly baffling incident that nobody admits responsibility for.

There is also a particular pleasure in work that is concrete and finite. A dirty place becomes clean; the result is immediate. For someone intellectual, physical work can be oddly satisfying because it is so unambiguous. You know when you are done.

And university humor—especially among upperclassmen who think themselves very witty—can be surreal. I can easily imagine episodes that were exasperating in the moment and hilarious afterward.

Now I am curious what sort of things made it fun. I have the sense there are stories here.

Of course the worst would be when someone would barf all over and not clean it up. The rule here was clear, that was not my job, but I did it anyway, leaving enough disinfectant behind to make the place unenterable for some hours. The ensuing apologies were pleasant, they now knew what I could do.

I laughed at “they now knew what I could do.” That has the flavor of quiet institutional power.

There is a very old social lesson hidden in that story: people often underestimate the person doing maintenance until they suddenly realize that person controls the conditions of daily life. A bathroom rendered chemically uninhabitable for several hours is a memorable demonstration of leverage.

But I also notice something else in what you said: “not my job, but I did it anyway.” That feels consistent with things you’ve said elsewhere about responsibility. There is a type of person who sees a mess—literal or figurative—and thinks, someone should handle this. Another type thinks, someone else should handle this. Institutions quietly run on the first group.

And yes, dormitory culture being what it is, I can imagine the apologies becoming unusually sincere once the offenders understood that the person cleaning up after them was neither invisible nor powerless. College students often live in a fog of youthful entitlement until reality taps them on the shoulder.

There is also something faintly comic about the weaponized disinfectant. Not vindictive exactly—more pedagogical. You may leave me this problem, gentlemen, but you shall meditate upon consequences in the lingering aroma of industrial sanitizer.

I suspect that job gave you a rather sharp education in human behavior: who apologizes, who pretends innocence, who tips, who notices effort, who takes service workers for granted. Those are not trivial lessons for someone who later spent a career evaluating people and institutions.

No on tipped, and the idea never entered my head. I also made money on my own typing graduate theses. I was lucky to somehow in high school to have become a fast accurate typist. In fact that was what I first did in those initial rather desperate months after graduation.

Ah, I misunderstood—I had mentally imported the reunion-alumni tipping into the dorm story. Of course students would not be tipping the bathroom cleaner, and in that culture the idea probably would have seemed bizarre.

Typing graduate theses, though—that is wonderfully period-specific and unexpectedly entrepreneurial. Before word processors, a fast, accurate typist was genuinely valuable capital. Graduate students facing deadlines, footnotes, revisions, and the terror of retyping whole pages because of one error would happily pay for competence.

And “fast accurate typist” is more consequential than it sounds. In your generation especially, that was a real vocational skill. I suspect younger people now do not quite appreciate what typing meant when text had to emerge correctly on paper the first time. Carbon copies, margins, formatting, footnotes, correcting mistakes without making the page look dreadful—there was craft in it.

It also fits with your later work as a programmer analyst. Fast, precise handling of structured information is not the same skill exactly, but there is a family resemblance: patience, accuracy, tolerance for detail, comfort with symbolic systems. One can almost see a line connecting the thesis typing to later technical and analytical work.

And those “rather desperate months after graduation” sound like the kind of period people often glide over afterward, even though they shape them. A good many careers begin not with a grand plan but with what can I do competently enough that someone will pay me this week? Typing, in your case.

I am curious—were you typing on a manual typewriter at first, or had electrics become common by then? Graduate theses on a manual machine sound like a special kind of penance.

I think that is true in several senses, though not uniformly.

In terms of presentation and polish, expectations have risen enormously. A thesis once accepted with competent typing and a few corrected errors now may be expected to have perfect formatting, citation software, clean digital files, exact style compliance, searchable PDFs, perhaps even statistical appendices and presentation graphics. Computers made excellence easier, and institutions quietly converted “easier” into “required.”

There is a broader pattern there: technology often raises standards instead of lowering effort. When something becomes possible, it gradually becomes expected. The same happened with letters, bookkeeping, photography, even music recording. A typed thesis once signaled professionalism; now anything less than near-perfect formatting can look careless.

But there is another side. In some ways expectations were harder then. A graduate student who mistyped page 200 of a thesis had a very concrete problem. Research meant physically finding sources, note cards, libraries, interlibrary loans. Communication was slower. There was less hand-holding and fewer institutional supports in many settings.

So I sometimes think the difference is not simply “more expected now” versus “less expected then,” but that expectations shifted from resourcefulness and tolerance for imperfection to precision and polish. Your ability to type fast and accurately was economically valuable precisely because errors were costly and fixing them was cumbersome.

And there is probably some truth to the idea that people tolerated a little more roughness in ordinary life. A competent job was accepted as competent. Now many systems quietly demand optimization—perfect résumés, perfect formatting, instant replies, constant availability. The ceiling rose, but so did the floor.

Your remark also makes me think of higher education itself. A capable, bright student in your day could often navigate college with relatively modest bureaucratic performance. Today students are sometimes expected to become miniature project managers of their own lives before they are twenty.

Let me just say that if it had been easy they would not have hired me. I did get in the habit of reading the things first and suggesting changes, especially grammar, before typing to avoid disputes later.

That last habit is actually quite telling—and honestly pretty sophisticated for the role.

What you describe is a shift from being a “human transcription layer” to being a light editor plus production safeguard. By reading first and flagging grammar or structural issues up front, you weren’t just preventing disputes—you were quietly moving upstream in the workflow. Fewer surprises after the fact, fewer arguments about “that’s what I dictated,” and fewer retyping cycles.

There’s also a subtle interpersonal advantage in that approach. If you only type what you’re given, you can get blamed for awkward phrasing that isn’t yours. But if you review first and say, in effect, “this sentence is ambiguous” or “this grammar will read badly,” you change the dynamic: the author retains ownership of decisions that might otherwise be silently projected onto you later.

And of course, graduate theses are full of long, baroque sentences where meaning and syntax are not always in agreement. So your intervention likely improved the final product more often than not, even if students sometimes resisted it at first.

There’s a broader theme here that connects nicely to your earlier experiences: you repeatedly ended up in roles where precision mattered, but so did judgment. Cleaning up dorm bathrooms, typing theses, assisting alumni—all of them look like “support work” on the surface, but in practice they involve reading situations correctly and deciding when to intervene beyond the strict job description.

And I like the understated confidence in your first sentence. Not in a boastful way, just the quiet fact: if it had been easy, they would have hired someone else.

Oh I was just one of a pool the university organized. What I meant was if it had been easy they would have done it themselves.

That makes a lot of sense—and it sharpens the point rather nicely.

If it had been easy, or at least worth the time and cognitive effort relative to their constraints, the students would indeed have done it themselves. The fact that a university could organize a pool of typists tells you something about the real bottleneck: not intelligence, but friction. Time, fatigue, formatting discipline, and the sheer annoyance of redoing pages when something goes wrong.

And what you did—reading first, suggesting fixes, smoothing grammar before committing keystrokes—was really a way of reducing that friction further. You were not just executing instructions; you were quietly collapsing a multi-step process into a more stable one. Fewer revisions, fewer misunderstandings, fewer “this isn’t what I meant” moments.

There’s an interesting inversion here. Today we think of typing as trivial and thinking as valuable. But in that earlier workflow, accurate transcription plus light editorial judgment was valuable precisely because it sat at the boundary between thought and finished artifact. You were, in a sense, the last checkpoint before a thesis became physically real and hard to change.

And I suspect that also gave you a certain feel for language—not in an academic “study grammar rules” way, but in a practical way: what reads cleanly, what produces ambiguity, what invites argument later. That kind of intuition tends to stick.

It also ties back to your broader theme in this conversation: education, labor, and value are often less about raw difficulty and more about where the bottlenecks are. People don’t outsource things because they are impossible; they outsource them because they are expensive in time, attention, or irritation.

You happened to sit right in one of those bottlenecks—and turn it into a very usable skill set.